Archive for California

| December 5, 2013
One comment

“Project Homeless Connect” Provides Many Services in 220 Communities, Including Wealthy Santa Cruz, CA and Morristown, NJ, Where Homelessness is Increasing

Project Homeless Connect 2009

Project Homeless Connect 2009 (Photo credit: University of Denver)

Although homelessness is declining nationally, it is still increasing in many communities, including wealthy Santa Cruz, CA and Morristown, NJ. One reason the situation is improving in many communities is due to the Project Homeless Connect program, which Mayor Gavin Newsome created in San Francisco in 2004 and which now is providing needed services for people without homes in 220 communities and three countries. The federal government’s Interagency Council on Homelessness has declared Project Homeless Connect a national best practice model.

Project Homeless Connect holds large annual events at which homeless people can take advantage of numerous offered services, including dental care, eyeglasses, family support, food, HIV testing, housing, hygiene products, medical care, mental health services, substance abuse treatment, SSI benefits, legal advice, state identification cards, voice mail, employment counseling, job placement, wheelchair repair and veterinary services. Hundreds of individuals, corporations, nonprofits and government agencies provide these services.

Recently, more than 40 groups offered services at the fourth annual Project Homeless Connect event at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. More than 700 people attended and took advantage of services including medical care, legal help, food and haircuts.
Kymberly Lacrosse, community organizer for United Way of Santa Cruz County, one of the organizers of the event, said:

It was a great turnout for clients. It was 700 people that didn’t get served yesterday or the day before. Even if it had only been 100, it’ would still be amazing.

According to a recent countywide survey, Santa Cruz County now has 3,536 homeless, up 41% from 2,265 in 2009. The City of Santa Cruz has 892 persons without habitation, or 31% of that total. Forty-four percent of the county’s homeless live on the street, 28% reside in cars or vans, 11% are in emergency shelters, 8% are in encampment areas, 7% are in emergency transitional housing and 2% sleep in abandoned buildings.

Thirty-eight percent of those experiencing homelessness for the first time had been homeless for a year or more. Thirty-one percent of survey respondents reported not receiving any government benefits. Twenty eight people spent one or more nights in jail or prison in the past year.

Three hundred and ninety-five of the county homeless were veterans, and 87% of those lived on the street. Five hundred and forty-four homeless people were in families. There were 128 unaccompanied children, and 97% of them were on the street.

Sixty-eight percent of survey respondents reported a disabling condition. Such conditions included mental illness (55%), substance abuse (26%), chronic physical illness (17%), physical disability (20%) and developmental disability (3%).Thirty-nine percent used emergency room services one to three times in the previous 12 months, and 21% did so four or times.

Affluent Morris County, NJ has seen homelessness rise by 13% over the past four years. Project Homeless Connect recently held an event in downtown Morristown where more than 200 people took advantage of services from haircuts to healthcare offered by 35 entities.
Why does such a rich area see homelessness increasing? Because modest gains in the economic recovery mean rents are rising high enough to disqualify people who depend on federal housing vouchers to subsidize their rents.

Lisa Falcone, director of Project HOMI (Homeless Outreach to People with Mental Illness) said:

When I started placing people in rooming houses five years ago, the rents per month for a room were about $200 less than they are now. Now you can rent a room for anywhere from $600 to $700 a month, and it’s hard to get a $500 room. The cost of utilities and overall living expenses has gone up, too. It’s difficult for people to make ends meet, and there’s a lack of jobs.

Some of the few affordable rental options are barely habitable. To make matters worse, the Congressional sequestration has reduced by 5% to 8% the number of HUD vouchers available in communities. Steve Berg, vice president of programs and policy for the National Alliance to End Homelessness, says:

At a time when there’s a lot of people in a lot of need, the program should be going up to meet the need, but instead, it’s going down.

The national alliance reports that sequestration puts at risk 125,000 individuals and families using vouchers nationwide, as well as another 100,000 in emergency shelters.

The 2013 Morris County Point in Time Count of the Homeless tallied 346 people, including 88 children, this past Jan. 30, an increase of 9% from 2011. Some estimate that the number of people who are homeless over the course of this year could be two to four times larger.

The Morris County Point in Time Count also revealed that 18% were unsheltered; 24 %were in their 40s; 31%had been homeless for more than a year; 60% were Caucasian and 60% suffered from a mental illness.
Project HOMI started the year with a caseload of 80 and is ending it with approximately 180, according to Falcone, whose mental health association also was involved with another 700 people.

Exacerbating the problem, Falcone said, is the reality that rooms with rents affordable enough to meet HUD voucher requirements are less likely to be in hub towns like Dover, Morristown or Parsippany, where there are services. Instead, they tend to be in outlying areas of the county, not close to public transportation, so these people can’t get to jobs or the treatments they need.

The recently updated Morris County Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness calls for several measures, including the creation of a centralized homeless management information system as well as permanent housing solutions for specialized populations.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta
Category: California, Homelessness | Tags: , , , , , ,
| September 20, 2013
No comments

Netflix’s 13-hour Series “Orange is the New Black” and Britain’s 106-episode “Bad Girls” Dramatically Focus on the Plight of Incarcerated Women

English: Orange and black rectangle Italiano: ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I recently watched and thoroughly enjoyed all 13 episodes of Netflix’s new women-in-prison drama, Orange is the New Black based on Piper Kerman’s book about her time in federal prison. I thought the many characters were richly portrayed, the well-written episodes were compelling and dramatic, and the series focused on many of the issues that plague incarcerated females.

I also greatly enjoyed the first two seasons of the excellent British incarcerated women series Bad Girls. You can see the powerful 10-episode first season on Netflix, and many scenes are free on YouTube. There have been 106 episodes broadcast in Britain from 1999 to 2006. The series features 50 disparate female characters. A stage musical version ran briefly in 2007 and is available on DVD. Bad Girls won 10 major British awards, including Most Popular Drama, Best Loved Drama, three Best Actresses and a Best Actor. In Britain, population 60 million, several episodes attracted more than 9 million viewers. It has aired in many countries, including Montenegro, Finland, New Zealand and Georgia. It has been reported that Oscar winner Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under) is adapting an American version of Bad Girls for HBO.

In the American series, Orange is the New Black, there were many minority and lesbian characters, an elderly prisoner and even a transgendered inmate. Both series dealt with mental illness, drug abuse, chronic disease, prison rape, sex for favors, abusive and manipulative guards and other pressing issues. Bad Girls dramatized prison pregnancy and childbirth. Both series have mother and daughter prisoners.

In the first harrowing season of Bad Girls, a pregnant prisoner miscarries in her cell, an inmate is viciously strip-searched by fellow prisoners for concealed drugs, and bullying drives another prisoner to suicide.

Both series dramatize that women’s prisons are terrible, often inhuman places. In 37 U.S. states, today, women can still be shackled during labor and delivery.

According to the Women’s Prison Association

The female prison population has soared by 835 percent over the last 30 years, while the male prison population rose by 416 percent. More than two-thirds of women in prison are convicted of nonviolent offences, such as drug-related crimes.
In 2008, 93 of every 100,000 white women were incarcerated, while 349 of every 100,000 black women and 147 of every 100,000 Hispanic women were. Fifty-one percent of women in prison are aged 30 to 44.

Women in prison face challenges different than those faced by men in prison, and female incarceration tends to treat the sentence inflexibly. For women, sentence is a sentence, whether or not there are children waiting for the mother outside.

According to The Sentencing Project, Oklahoma incarcerates more women per capita than any other state, with 130 out of every 100,000 women in prison, whereas Maine locks up only 21.

Women in prison (59 percent) are more likely than are men (43 percent) to have chronic and/or communicable medical problems (including HIV, Hepatitis C and sexually transmitted diseases). Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of women in state prisons in 2004 had symptoms of a current mental health problem.

Finally, Carole Seligman, office manager of Prison Radio, a production studio aiming to challenge unjust incarceration practices, said:

This country is notorious for not granting compassionate release to prisoners with terminal illnesses who are elderly and are dying and denied to die at home.

Related Articles

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta
Category: California, Prison, Prison Reform, Women's Issues | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| November 16, 2012
No comments

Ending Homelessness: Kobe Bryant’s New Mission

Funny how we all look up to our heroes. For some of us they are captains of industry, for others they are comic book characters, and for a vast swathe of the American public they are sports stars. The non-fictional ones can often be found espousing causes they find important, whether out of real altruism or because they are seeking the limelight. Either way they can often provide a boost in awareness on the issues they publically endorse.

Kobe Bryant is one of those everyday heroes who comes from the world of basketball, and he is doing just that. Wednesday saw the release of a series of videos that he created in partnership with TakePartTV. The subject? Homelessness.

Take a quick look at the Intro Video in the series and then we will move on (the rest are embedded at the bottom of this post).

The Hufffington Post tells us a bit more about Kobe’s perspective on the subject:

This web series is a part of Bryant’s ongoing effort to fight homelessness in LA County, which is home to about 254,000 homeless individuals — more than any other city in the U.S.

In September, the Kobe and Vanessa Bryant Family Foundation completed renovation of My Friend’s Place, a drop-in center for homeless youth in Hollywood. Bryant will also be the honorary chair for “HomeWalk in LA” on Nov. 17. You can sign up to join Kobe’s team here .

‘There has to be something else bigger than just yourself and what you leave out on the basketball court. You have to use that to affect change and affect change in a serious way,’Bryant said in ‘Mission.’

The videos themselves take a page from our strategy: personal narrative. After the introductory videos, the rest are Kobe’s conversations with the homeless of Skid Row. Four residents of the Los Angeles Mission are interviewed. Anonymous faces resolve into: Anthony , Dennis , Kenneth , and Reggie (videos embedded at the bottom of this post).

These are real human beings who are actively trying for something better in the face of terrific odds and obstacles that change almost daily. It is hard to look into these all-too-human faces as they report from the trenches of human adversity. While you would probably pass any of them by without notice on the street, seeing these videos leaves you wishing you knew them better.

Eric Freeman on Sports.Yahoo.Com helps us keep Bryant’s efforts in perspective:

It’s important to temper our praise for what Bryant is doing here — it’s not as if he spends his off-hours volunteering at the mission or is single-handedly taking people off the streets. But appearing in this series is still very meaningful, because it ensures that more people will see this series than if he’d merely lent his name to the project or provided narration. Basketball fans follow the events of Kobe Bryant’s life. By interacting with the homeless himself, Kobe knew that he’d reveal the experiences of the homeless to an audience that may not have encountered them otherwise.

Take a few minutes and watch these videos. Meet some of the people who have slipped off the radar and see that they are not that far from you and me.

First off is Kobe’s impression of the Mission and Skid Row after walking the streets and talking with the people living rough there.

Meet Anthony

Meet Dennis

Meet Kenneth

Meet Reggie

Category: California, Homelessness, Poverty | Tags:
| November 13, 2012
One comment

AB-109 and rising crime – Is there a correlation?

Sacramento Police Department

Sacramento Police Department (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A little over a year ago Gov. Jerry Brown’s AB-109 began the process of reducing the state’s prison population by 33,000 before June of 2014.

Under the bill, triple-non — non-violent, non-serious, non-sexual — offenders would become the responsibility of the counties, not the state, with a large number of them returning to the streets of California.

In that time crime has been rising, and many fingers are pointed at AB-109 as the cause. Unfortunately there was no language in the legislation dictating how to asses the results. While the counties that have accepted assistance of a technical nature from the state are required to report, there are no standards of procedures for that reporting: a truly stunning oversight.

Heather Gilligan of The Sacramento Bee is one of the few journalists sharing police data on the subject. This excerpt provides the numbers she came up with.

“It’s diminishing public safety,” said Lynne Brown, director of Advocates for Public Safety, a group that represents law enforcement officers who want to repeal AB109.

Republican legislators agree, and they have called for a special session of the Legislature to change or kill the law. They say that crime has increased in Sacramento, Stockton, Oakland and Los Angeles, according to preliminary numbers from police departments.

There have been many incidents in the news involving crime perpetrated by released inmates. One particularly violent example is that of parolee Raoul Leyva. Raoul allegedly beat 20-year-old Brandy Marie Arreola into a coma last April. The beating occurred not long after he had been sentenced to jail for 100 days for parole violations but had been released after two days due to overcrowding. In light of the numerous incidents it behooves us to take a look at the situation in greater detail.

Ms. Gilligan continues:

But police data actually show a mixed picture.

In Sacramento, Part I crimes, those that are reported to the FBI and eventually become the uniform crime rate for a city, are up by 8.1 percent this year compared with the same period in 2011. Homicides, however, decreased by 18.5 percent, according to Sacramento Police Department crime data.

Violent crime is currently down in Los Angeles by 7 percent and property crime is the same year-to-date. In Oakland, Part I crimes have increased by 20 percent, according to the Oakland Police Department. Some increases – like those for rape (up 21 percent) and robbery (up 20 percent) – are striking. Part II crimes – including minor assault, drug possession, vandalism and fraud – have decreased by 10 percent.

In Stockton, there have been 51 reported homicides this year – six more than in the same period last year, according to Stockton police spokesman Joseph Silva.

“Clearly, what’s happened with (AB109) is that criminals learn there are no consequences,” said Assemblyman Bill  Berryhill, a Republican whose San Joaquin County district includes Stockton and Modesto.

But determining the effect of a single policy on crime rates is difficult, said Joan Petersilia, professor of law at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center.

No matter how you slice it, the issue is a complex one. The lack of any procedure for collecting data on how this influx of former inmates will impact the communities involved is troubling, to say the least. The fuzziness on details also means that most communities are forging their own paths when it comes to their methodology in handling the realignment.

Los Angeles and San Francisco are great examples of this in action. In LA, the jail population is increasing, while in San Francisco they are reducing theirs by keeping the focus where it should be: on rehabilitation.

We need more hard data, and we should have had a plan in place before releasing these inmates. Without proper support – therapy, drug rehab, job training, etc. – the chances are that many will offend again.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta
Category: California, Criminal Justice, Humane Exposures | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| October 17, 2012
No comments

Hollywood Producer Re-envisions Juvenile Justice

Hollywood Producer Scott Budnick has spent a decade dedicating his energies to creating opportunity for incarcerated youth. It all started in 2002 when he became part of an innovative program called InsideOUT Writers.

The program conducts weekly writing classes within the Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall System. Classes that are taught by prominent writers, poets, screenwriters, journalists and educators. It is a combination of education and narrative, one that provides the inmates a forum in which to tell their personal stories and re-examine the past. Its goal is to help them write the next chapter of their own story, hopefully a better one.

Budnick is part a team inaugurated by Los Angeles Times staff writer Duane Noriyuki and Pulitzer Prize nominee Mark Salzman, two of the original teachers.

Fast forward to the present day. Here is an encapsulated view of how Budnick has taken his work on InsideOUT as the foundation for even more ambitious work along these lines. (Quoted from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation website.)

After volunteering with the InsideOUT program for several years, Budnick turned his attention to young adults in the state prison system.  He noticed that young adults moving from the Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) to one of the 33 adult institutions were not classified any differently than hardened career criminals. In 2008, Budnick approached CDCR Undersecretary Scott Kernan with the argument that the system was turning kids into worse criminals and it was time to try something new.

This alone is a breakthrough. Every reputable study out there supports the stance that adult facilities tend to simply be “crime school” for juveniles incarcerated within.

Budnick, along with Undersecretary Kernan and Tanya Rothchild of the Classification Services Unit, developed a pilot for the Youth Offender Classification Program at California Institution for Men (CIM) in Chino.  The program created a system that classified youth entering the adult prison system based on behavior, wants and needs rather than by age and offense.

The program was a success, with hundreds of young adults enrolled in college courses at several CDCR adult institutions in Southern California. The programs included mentoring and a college-dormitory environment more conducive to learning than a typical prison environment.

Due to CDCR’s inmate population reduction, CIM’s East Facility was converted from a reception yard to a Level III Sensitive Needs Yard (SNY) that includes inmates who have denounced gang affiliation and want to turn their lives around.  Budnick and CDCR officials envisioned the conversion as the perfect spot for a special program in which all of the inmates are enrolled in college courses.  Within a month of the conversion and the program start-up, there were 225 inmates enrolled in college courses.

Education is one of the leading ways to combat recidivism. It provides the tools needed to re-enter normal society by incubating job skills and discipline. Every step we can take to improve access to education is a step toward eliminating problems like homelessness and juvenile crime.

The program’s effectiveness in this regard is amply illustrated by it’s continued expansion and success.

To enhance the program further, Budnick contacted Professor Renford Reese of the political science department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.  Reese engaged students at Cal Poly Pomona campus and now has about 80 students coming into the CIM yard on a weekly basis for tutoring, mentoring, life-skills presentations, presentations about their majors and inter-disciplinary studies.

Programs and strategies like this are proven to be effective. They allow juvenile inmates a much better chance of staying out of prison once released.

Curious about what these kids are writing? InsideOUT Writers publishes a quarterly literary journal of writings that is distributed to students and probation staff, a journal that is available for download on their website (click on Writing From the Inside).

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta
Category: California, Criminal Justice, Education, Juvenile Justice | Tags: , , ,
| September 17, 2012
No comments

Education and Prisons in California

There are two vital issues in California that are inextricably linked – education and incarceration.

Education is one of the most reliable paths out of poverty and deprivation. Those who live within the confines of our overburdened prison system are quite often those deprived of it.

This is what makes it so terribly disturbing when you look at the numbers released in a recent study by California Common Sense. Stephanie Chung of NBC covered the story last week when the report was released:

California is spending 1,370 percent more money on prisons today compared to 1980 levels. NBC Bay Area got the first look at a report from Los Altos-based, non-partisan research group California Common Sense (CACS) published Thursday.

It’s the first time a group has looked at 30 years worth of data and crunched the numbers to show a long-term trend between state spending on prisons and on higher education, according to Director of Research Mike Polyakov.

California spent $592 million on corrections in 1980, Polyakov said. That spending has jumped to $9.2 billion in 2011.

Meanwhile, higher education spending has decreased. Researchers found that there is a trend to pay University of California and California State University faculty less money than in the past.

The disparity is unnerving. Even more so when you start reading through the report. Let’s take a look at the key findings, shall we?

  • Corrections’ growing slice of the State budget, High Education’s shrinking slice. As CDCR’s share of the State General Fund budget increased steadily through most of the last three decades, higher education’s share declined consistently.
  • Corrections’ first recession era budget cuts in 30 years. Although the Corrections budget survived most previous economic downturns unscathed, since the onset of the most recent economic downturn, expenditure on Corrections has seen a substantial decline.
  • Corrections inmate population explosion driving higher costs. Over the last 30 years, the number of people California incarcerates grew more than eight times faster than the general population.  Our calculations show that 55% of the increase in the cost of the state prison system between 1980 and 2012 (after adjusting for inflation) can be traced to this rapid growth.
  • Annual salary increases for prison guards, stagnant faculty salaries over last decade. Whereas prison guard salaries are subject to periods of sustained salary increases, faculty salaries have seen only weak growth over the years, falling in real terms over the past decade.
What does it say about us as a society that we spend so much on imprisoning our population, yet so little on preparing them for a productive and happy future? More than half of the increase in corrections’ spending is attributable to the massive increase in the imprisoned population, an increase that occurred during the period when “zero-tolerance” laws were very much in fashion.
Which one do you think will provide society with better long-term returns: pouring money into education so that our children have the best possible chance for a future or continuing to pay skyrocketing prices to file away our society’s cast-offs behind concrete walls and bars?
Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta
Category: California, Criminal Justice, Education | Tags: , , , , ,
| August 8, 2012
No comments

Infographic: Invest in People, Not Prisons

Invest in People Not Prisons

Browse more Political infographics.

Category: California, Criminal Justice, Prison, Prison Reform | Tags: , , ,
| March 7, 2012
No comments

A Conversation with Jeanne McAlister

Today our resident blogger had the opportunity to talk with Jeanne McAlister, Chief Executive Officer and founder of McAlister Institute. The conversation was enlightening to say the least!

Jeanne McAlister, the Chief Executive Officer and founder of McAlister Institute, has been a pioneer in the field of recovery. She has constantly advocated for responsive and needed treatment services and developed programs which could easily be replicated by others. Recognizing that drug abuse negatively affects all aspects of the individual, family, and community life, the goal of McAlister Institute programs is to assist individuals in regaining their lives by supporting the recovery process. As a result, tens of thousands of youth and adults have successfully regained their lives through her vision and with the help of McAlister Institute’s wide variety of programs.

Category: California, Interview, Substance Abuse | Tags: , , , ,
| December 28, 2011
No comments

Moving Upstream in California

Upstream InvestmentsWhen discussing issues of juvenile justice it is important to realize that what really must be addressed are the root causes of the behavior. Juvenile offenders often experience abuse at home, suffer from addictive behaviors, or experience a lack of adequate education among other factors.

The outcome is the important thing – lower crime in our communities and a better future for our kids. Incarceration has been proven to be ineffective at either.

One group in Sonoma County, CA is doing their best to address the root factors of the problem in an attempt to stop these problems before they destroy lives. The group is called  Sonoma Upstream: Upstream Investments,  and they describe themselves as follows on their website:

The seeds of intractable problems (like crime, substance abuse, unemployment, homelessness, and child abuse or domestic violence) often occur early in life. The costs of addressing these problems once they manifest themselves downstream is staggering, and may include criminal justice costs, public aid, increased educational services, substance abuse services, and many other local services—not to mention the lost tax base and lost productivity caused by these obstacles to employment. In addition to this financial burden, the devastating societal costs are well documented and impact us all.

Rather than spending limited resources to repair difficult societal problems after they occur, upstream investments strategically target the factors that lead to those problems, intervening early with outcome-based programs and policies to reduce the occurrence of these problems before they require more drastic (and expensive) services.

Their objectives, while limited to Sonoma County, are both laudable and supported by current research. Their objectives for the present include the elimination of poverty, equal opportunity, quality education, and communities that are both healthy and nurturing for all. The end result of these objectives is that county residents will “benefit from prevention-focused policies and interventions that increase equality and reduce monetary and societal costs.”

This can easily seem like “pie in the sky” to some, but the fundamental practicality of their approach is keenly illustrated in a downloadable pdf that illustrates in detail exactly how they wish to achieve each objective. From the precisely targeted factors and detailed interventions to address each one to the indicators for success that will be used to measure progress.

If you’re in Sonoma County you should get familiar with them, and if you’re from elsewhere they can give you some great ideas on how to work toward these goals within your own community.

Category: California, Criminal Justice, Education, Juvenile Justice | Tags: , , , ,
| December 26, 2011
No comments

Budget Cuts Endanger The California Dept. of Juvenile Justice

Money 2Under the reduced budget enacted earlier this month, the California department of Juvenile Justice will cease to exist unless counties shell out $125,000 a year per youth offender. That’s bad.

Marisa Lagos of the San Fransico Chronicle notes the conundrum facing California counties in the new year:

Under the automatic cutbacks approved by lawmakers in June and set to take effect Jan. 1, the agency’s $72 million annual budget will be eliminated, and counties will have to pay the state $125,000 a year for each juvenile offender it wants the state to continue housing – or take those youths back to serve their time at local facilities. In a series of letters to Gov. Jerry Brown, the statewide associations representing county governments, district attorneys and probation officials have warned that the change will force counties to make the “untenable” choice between paying millions of dollars a year they don’t have or moving youth offenders to county facilities that are ill-equipped to handle them.

This will have the deleterious effect of pushing large numbers of youths into adult facilities where it only costs about $50,000 per  annually to house inmates, as opposed to the $175,000 apiece for juveniles. The problem is that the extra $125,000 per inmate for juvenile offenders pays for vital treatment and programs. The difference is stark, just look up the recidivism number on kids incarcerated as adults (there’s a lot of documentation in our prior posts, go look around).  Saving that money short term will breed more hardened criminals in the long term. Which is really more expensive?

To add another layer of complexity to the issue. The serious, violent youth offenders are a lawsuit liability for the counties. Criminologist Barry Kriserg, a long time monitor of the department of juvenile Justice, has warned that they could face litigation if the add violent youth offenders into existing county facilities. Of course county officials are worried about more than just potential legal action, as Lagos notes further down in her column:

‘If counties are forced to absorb this population in some fashion at the local level, we are concerned that the mixing of the most serious and violent juvenile offenders with the youth now in our custody and care will greatly compromise rehabilitative efforts with the current local population,’ wrote Mike McGowan, Gregory Totten and Linda Penner – the presidents of the statewide associations representing counties, district attorneys and probation chiefs – in a Dec. 7 letter.

This population, they wrote, ‘is decidedly unfit’ for county facilities, ‘as these youth possess complex criminal profiles often accompanied by significant mental health, behavioral and treatment needs.’

It is those needs that account for the $125,000 per inmate that the budget cuts are trying to save. Failing to address them in the short term can be far cheaper, but is it really worth the expense? That money pays for programs to fight recidivism, programs geared towards the immature psychology and neurology of youth. Without those the potential for kids to enter the system and come out as hardened criminals rather than productive members of society skyrockets. That means more money spent on enforcement, more money spent on court, more money spent on future incarceration, and the unmeasurable cost to the victims of their future crimes.

Which is really more expensive?

Image Source: borman818 on Flickr, used under it’s Creative Commons license

Category: California, Criminal Justice, Juvenile Justice, Legislation | Tags: , , , , ,
« Older Entries